Fear of rape in unlit latrines drove women soldiers to dehydration deaths in Iraq

Evidence

At Camp Victory—the base where the two Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders performed with Al Franken—several women died of dehydration in their barracks during the first years of the occupation of Iraq. They died because, despite 120-degree heat, they stopped drinking water every afternoon. They stopped drinking water because they feared being raped by other GIs while using the unlit latrines at night. Hynes and others call it a “war on two fronts,” in which women in Afghanistan and Iraq have had to fight “a second, more damaging war—a private, preemptive one in the barracks.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 571

Categorization

• SEED: Powerful angle for an article on how institutional negligence, not enemy action, kills soldiers — the barracks as a second battlefield.